Female Identities in the Nazi Camps: French Deportees' Testimonial Accounts of the 1990s

Abstract

The article focuses on a selection of accounts published in the 1990s by French women deported as Jews or members of the Resistance and incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps and death camps, these accounts constituting part of the 'second wave' of a little-known corpus of some 120 such testimonial works. An initial discussion outlines the critical lacuna surrounding these texts, which have been neglected by historians and literary critics alike. Various reasons for this critical silence are advanced, including the existence of articulated resistances to gendered approaches to the Holocaust.The main body of the paper examines gender and sexual identities in the camps by considering the following areas: the female deportees' collecting of recipes (opening out onto discourses linking food and national identity); attitudes to clothing in the camps; nudity and the gaze; the shaving of hair; same-sex desire. Reasons for the absence of certain material in the 1990s texts, which appears in earlier accounts, are discussed briefly.In conclusion, it is suggested that certain approaches to gender and sexuality as analytic categories applied to female-authored testimonial accounts can be reductive. Female deportees negotiated complex identities in the camps; identities were both imposed and assumed in terms of nationality, political affiliation, religion, and class, as well as sexuality and gender.